Victor Hugo Benioff

"Hugo Benioff, too, was a great man.

ASPATURIAN: What was his field?.

LOWENSTAM: Seismology. But he started out, apparently, as a high-powered instrument maker. All the good seismographs all over the world were his invention and his design. I just remembered a funny story about him. He was in Rome at the international seismologic meeting. He knew that one of the cardinals in the Vatican was a seismologist, but he had never paid much attention to him. The cardinal came to the meeting and asked Hugo if he wanted to see his instrumentation. So Hugo said, “Sure!” They got onto the grounds of the Vatican and they came to a big, high wall. There was an iron ladder, and they went over the ladder and into an enclosure—four sides with these high walls—and in the center, on the open ground, was the seismological station, hidden from everything else. Hugo was very impressed by the cardinal’s knowledge, and the cardinal said it was Hugo’s instrumentation that made it possible to do his work. As they went back over the wall to the general grounds, Hugo turned to him and said, “Tell me, how do you reconcile being a cardinal and a seismologist?”

“That’s very simple. When I’m on this side of the wall, I’m a cardinal. When I’m on the other side of the wall, I’m a seismologist.” [Laughter] Hugo was a very broad scientist. He was the one who showed that there is the circum Pacific Rim movement of the continents counterclockwise. He was the first to measure the strain at the fault lines along the San Andreas Fault. He got huge quartz crystals and put them across the fault and watched the strain effect on it. He was really phenomenal.

Hugo Benioff was famous for another thing. He developed an electronically controlled concert piano, entirely run by electronics. He took decades to complete it, because a lot of theory wasn’t known; that came much later. And finally he had it. We were often invited to his house to hear the various stages of development. As you know, the reason a piano doesn’t have a sharp tone like a harpsichord is because of the felt pieces at the end of the hammer. Hugo spent a long time working out how he was going to duplicate that, but he finally got it. Very famous pianists came. They would look very dubiously at that instrument—no strings, and everything controlled by electronics—sit down and try a little bit. And then they would suddenly perk up. I remember he couldn’t get some of them out of the chair to stop playing. It was so superior that for years I couldn’t listen to any other concert piano. The sad thing is that it was financed by Baldwin, the piano manufacturer. Baldwin had supported Hugo all these years to do it. Hugo had really wanted to build an electronic cello, but Baldwin talked him into a piano. So when it was finally completed and there was a concert at Carnegie Hall, people raved about it. It was the one and only concert where this instrument was ever used. Because shortly afterwards, Baldwin’s president died. His son took over and got some efficiency experts in, and they said that each electronic piano would cost about $100,000. They suggested he scratch the program, so they mothballed the whole thing. Hugo never got over it. When he retired to Mendocino County, he tried to build an electronic cello, but he died before he could finish it. "